Friday, November 28, 2008

It's the cold that cripples us on a winterSunday, when hope is at itsrarest. There are certain fixationsof consciousness, things that wanderabout the house searching for their place

and secretly they slip into a poem.It's envelopes from the watercompany, a knife smeared with butteron the tablecloth, that trail we leavebehind us and decipher without effortand to no advantage. It's the wait

and the delay. It's the streets so stillat newscast time and the clinking ofneighborhood cutlery. It's the nighttimeaimlessness of memory: it's the fearof having lost, quite casually,

Monday, November 24, 2008

The clouds seem neater than the trees.The sky, like faded overalls,Breaks the distances of sight;And shadow that defines the curbshelters the silhouette of dogWho, waiting patiently beneathThe amazing carriage with tangerine wheels,Is eyeless, though he seems to senseThe black Chihuahua that the pavement grows.

The street is bare. The hooves and maneOf the posing horse and his speckled flanksFlow back to the six in the cart he draws:The idiot aunt and the girl in white(A Ventriloquist's doll with a colorless wig),And a sexless figure upon whose lapA beast is squatting, macabre, blurred.

These four and the one in the yellow hatRegard us with eyes like photographsThat have been shown us long ago.––All but the man in the driver's seat,His wax hands fastened on the reins,Who, from the corners of his eyes,Watches the horse he does not trust.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

IThe painter's eye follows relation out.His work is not to paint the visible,He says, it is to render visible.

Being a man, and not a god, he standsAlready in a world of sense, from whichHe borrows, to begin with, mental thingsChiefly, the abstract elements of language:The point, the line, the plane, the colors andThe geometric shapes. Of these he spinsRelation out, he weaves its fabric upSo that it speaks darkly, as music doesSinging the secret history of the mind.And when in this the visible world appears,As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree,All haunted here and there with the human face,It happens as by accident, althoughThe accident is of design. It is becauseLanguage first rises from the speechless worldThat the painterly intelligenceCan say correctly that he makes his world,Not imitates the one before his eyes.Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores,The terrifying forests where nightfallEnfolds a lost and tired traveler.

And hence the careless crowd deludes itselfBy likening his hieroglyphic signsAnd secret alphabets to the drawing of a child.That likeness is significant the other sideOf what they see, for his simplicitiesAre not the first ones, but the furthest ones,Final refinements of his thought made visible.He is the painter of the human mindFinding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulnessThat is in things, and not the things themselves.

For such a man, art is an act of faith:Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,And praise the practise; nor does he divideMaking from teaching, or from theory.The three are one, and in his hours of artThere shines a happiness through darkest themes,As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

IIThe painter as an allegory of the mindAt genesis. He takes a burlap bag,Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher.He paints it black because, as he has said,Everything looks different on black.

Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe,And black because its volume is the voidBefore the stars were. At the painter's handVolume becomes one-sidedly a surface,And all his depths are on the face of it.

Against this flat abyss, this groundless groundOf zero thickness stretched against the coldDark silence of the Absolutely NotMaterial worlds arise, the colored earthsAnd oil of plants that imitate the light.

They imitate the light that is in thoughtFor mind relates to thinking as the eyeRelates to light. Only because the worldAlready is a language can the painter speakAccording to the grammar of the ground.

It is archaic speech, that has not yetDivided out its cadences in words;It is a language for the oldest spellsAbout how some thought rose into the mindWhile others, stranger still, sleep in the world.

So grows the garden green, the sun vermilionHe sees the rose flame up and fade and fall.And be the same rose still, the radiant in red.He paints his language, and his language isThe theory of what the painter thinks.

IIIThe painter's eye attends to death and birthTogether, seeing a single energyMomently manifest in every form,As in the tree the growing of the treeExploding from the seed not more nor lessThan from the void condensing down and in,Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree,The great tree standing in the garden, say,As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight,Growing its green height from dark watered earth,And as suspended weightless in the sky,Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head.He follows through the flowing of the formsFrom the divisions of the trunk out toThe veinings of the leaf, and the leaf's fall.His pencil meditates the many in the oneAfter the method in the confluence of rivers,The running of ravines on mountainsides,And in the deltas of the nerves; he seesHow things must be continuous with themselvesAs with whole worlds that they themselves are not,In order that they may be so transformed.He stands where the eternity of thoughtOpens upon perspective time and space;He watches mind become incarnate; then He paints the tree.

IVThese thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee,About how he in our hard time might stand to usEspecially whose lives concern themselves with learningAs patron of the practical intelligence of art,And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings,For all research that follows spirit where it goes.

That there should be much goodness in the world,Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm,And that it all goes down in the dust after a while,This is a subject for the steadiest meditationsOf the heart and mind, as for the tearsThat clarify the eye toward charity.

So may it be to all of us, that at some timesIn this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,And when impatience in the street and still despair at homeDivide the mind to rule it, there shall some comfort comeFrom the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his

Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind,As the painter dreaming in the scholar's house,His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,The same dream that then flared before intelligenceWhen light first went forth looking for the eye.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

.Every city in America is approachedthrough a work of art, usually a bridgebut sometimes a road that curves underneathor drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel-you don't know it-that takes you through the riversand under the burning hills. I went there to cryin the woods or carry my heavy bicyclethrough fire and flood. Some have little parks-San Francisco has a park. Albuquerqueis beautiful from a distance; it is purpleat five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,especially from the little rise on the hillat 14-C; it has twelve entranceslike the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,has two small floating bridges in front of itthat brought me in and out. I said good-byeto them both when I was 57. I'm readingJoseph Wood Krutch again-the second time.I love how he lived in the desert. I'm looking at the skullof Georgia O'Keeffe. I'm kissing Stieglitz good-bye.He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a cityin every sense of the word; he wore a libraryacross his chest; he had a church on his knees.I'm kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,the last true city; after him there wereonly overpasses and shopping centers,little enclaves here and there, a skyscraperwith nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turfwhere whores couldn't even walk, where nobody sits,where nobody either lies or runs; either thator some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,a flower sucking the water out of a rock.What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstoreslost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stickturning the bricks up, numbering the shards,dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I leftwith a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.I put it in my leather pockets nextto my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is therebeside his famous number; there is smokeand fire above his head; some bowlegged painteris whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waitingis taking down his words. I'm kissing Stieglitzgood-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photosare making me cry; we're walking down Fifth Avenue;we're looking for a pencil; there is a girlstanding against the wall-I'm shaking nowwhen I think of her; there are two buildings, oneis in blackness, there is a dying poplar;there is a light on the meadow; there is a manon a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Passing a Flemish village and a burning citypossible Babylon the Great, bringing the Springfrom Winter and any beginning to its end, there gothe actors in the ramshackle traveling showthat does whatever's done and then undoes it:the horses of the sun and moon, stumbling on plateand bullion, patiently pull the flat-bed wagonwhere Cronos munches a child and the zodiac-encircled worldbears up a tree that blossoms half and withers half;Death on a donkey follows, sloping his scythe,and last a trumpeter angel on an elephantis puffing the resurrection and the end of days.

Under the wheels, and under the animals' feet,palette and book are broken with the crowns of kingsand the instruments of music, intimating to our eyesby means of many examples the Triumph of Time,which everything that is, with everything that isn't,as Brueghel patiently puts it down, exemplifies.

Friday, November 14, 2008

.In the old master's landscape,the trees have roots beneath the oil paint,the path undoubtedly reaches its goal,the signature is replaced by a stately blade of grass,it's a persuasive five in the afternoon.May has been gently, yet firmly, detained,so I've lingered, too. Why, of course, my dear,I am the woman there, under the ash tree

Just see how far behind I've left you,see the white bonnet and the yellow skirt I wear,see how I grip my basket so as not to slip out of the painting,how I strut within another's fateand rest awhile from living mysteries.

Monday, November 10, 2008

.Though we knowhow it will end:in grief and silence,we go about our ordinary daysas if the acts of boiling an eggor smoothing down a bedwere so smallthey must be overlookedby death. And perhaps

the few years left, sun drenchedbut without grand purpose,will somehow endure,the way a portrait of lovers enduresradiant and true on the wall of some obscure Dutch museum,long after the namesof the artist and modelshave disappeared.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Friends carried off by lifeare the most difficult to appease, the mosttyrannical. Barbarians of an unknown land,they sip the poison of silence and they growbeyond all limits in the distance, a blind eyeto our loneliness. And to think that we werebrothers in arms, that we dug up buried treasurefrom the same islands, from the mostbarren of books. How things turn out.Could all have been in vain? It seemedthat we were destined for the samesongs, for a more certain kind of love.Well, well. And we cannot even understandwhat happened.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Winter by Breughel, the hill with huntersand dogs, at their feet the valley with the village.Almost home, but their dead-tired attitudes, their stepsin the snow––a return, but almost asslow as arrest. At their feet the depthsgrow and grow, become wider and further,until the landscape vanishes into a landscapethat must be there, is there but only

as a longing is there.

Ahead of them a jet-black bird dives down. Is it mockeryof this labored attempt to return to the lifedown there: the children skating on the pond,the farms with women waiting and cattle?

Monday, November 03, 2008

Translated from the Polish by ?Help! can anyone in the whole wide world send me this picture?

"Limbourg Brothers "Canonical Hours"

Up the verdantest of hills,in this most equestrian of pageants,wearing the silkiest of cloaks.

Toward a castle with seven towers,each of them by far the tallest.

In the foreground, a duke,most flatteringly unrotund;by his side, his duchessyoung and fair beyond compare.

Behind them, the ladies-in-waiting,all pretty as pictures, verily,then a page, the most ladsome of lads,and perched upon his pagey shouldersomething exceedingly monkeylike,endowed with the drollest of facesand tails.

Following close behind, three knights,all chivalry and rivalry,so if the first is fearsome of countenance,the next one strives to be more daunting still,and if he prances on a bay steedthe third will prance upon a bayer,and all twelve hooves dance glancinglyatop the most wayside of daisies.

Whereas whosoever is downcast and weary,cross-eyed and out at elbows,is most manifestly left out of the scene.

Even the least pressing of questions,burgherish or peasantish,cannot survive beneath this most azure of skies.

And not even the eaglest of eyescould spy even the tiniest of gallows -nothing casts the slightest shadow of a doubt.

Thus they proceed most pleasantlythrough this feudalest of realisms.

This same, however, has seen to the scene's balance:it has given them their Hell in the next frame.Oh yes, all that went withouteven the silentest of sayings.